Ep 62 Italian and Gluten Free
Let’s start the blog with the Show Notes for this episode:
On this episode I interview a blogger from Toronto, Ashley Gismondi, who is a proud Italian-Canadian. Ashley shares how her gluten free diet fits with the foods she was brought up on. She chats about cooking with her Nonna as a young child and lets us know about some Italian favourites that can be easily made gluten free. Ashley can be found online at www.celiacandthe6ix.com
Sue’s Websites and Social Media –
Podcast https://acanadianceliacpodcast.libsyn.com
Podcast Blog – https://www.acanadianceliacblog.com
Facebook – @acanadianceliacpodcast
Twitter – CeliacPodcastCA
Email – acdnceliacpodcast@gmail.com
Baking Website – https://www.suesglutenfreebaking.com
Instagram – @suesgfbaking
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUVGfpD4eJwwSc_YjkGagza06yYe3ApzL
(search Sues Gluten Free Baking)
Email – sue@suesglutenfreebaking.com
Other Podcast – Gluten Free Weigh In – https://glutenfreeweighin.libsyn.com
My Thoughts –
It’s funny what you remember from your childhood. My heritage is British, but along the way, my family took a liking to many kinds of foods. My father travelled on business for extended periods of time, and one of his favourite places to go was Italy. I remember as a child he would come home and amaze us with the few words he had learned in Italian.
My mother was a good cook, not a very adventurous one, but the food produced in her kitchen was nourishing, flavourful and satisfying, or in a word, memorable. My mother was always keen to cut recipes out of the newspaper, something that I don’t know even appears in newspapers today. I would often find yellowed, dog-eared scraps of printed paper with a favourite recipe on the counter or tucked into her recipe drawer – yes, it took a whole drawer to contain her carefully curated recipe collection.
Most Saturdays, my mother made spaghetti sauce. I never thought much of it until, as an adult, I realized that this was common in Italian homes, but not-so-common in other homes. Since my father had travelled to Italy so many times, he appointed himself the pasta cooking expert. I’m not sure if this venerated position existed in other households, but it certainly did in ours. There was a special pasta pot, he always used a kitchen timer and took over the kitchen for those brief minutes until the pasta was perfectly “a la dente”.
Making spaghetti on a Saturday was something my parents collaborated on for as long as I can remember. I can assure you, I didn’t leave home without the recipe. Now, when I make the meat sauce (it has to be a double recipe to save some for the freezer), my home smells like it did when I was a kid. It came up in the podcast, and just thinking about it, I can savour the rich aroma of Mom’s meat sauce on the stove. Some things remind you of home, the smell of my Mom’s sauce recipe reminds me of so much more and yes, the original recipe was always gluten free.